How to Choose the Perfect Bamboo Shades for Your Space

One of the things I’ve been doing a lot of since we’ve moved into our new house is choosing window treatments. Allllllllll of our curtains and blinds from the townhouse stayed with the townhouse (and wouldn’t have fit in the new house anyway), so we totally started from scratch!

A huge thanks to SelectBlinds for providing the bamboo shades for this post. My favorable opinion of gorgeous, high quality window treatments is 100% my own. 🙂 This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.

So far we’ve put blackout Roman shades in the Cs’ room (because sleeping children were my #1 priority 🙂 )…

…and pretty plantation shutters in the front rooms downstairs: the dining room and the bathroom. (Side note: who puts a bathroom with a window in the very front of the house?! Like literally right by the porch. We had to cover that up ASAP!)

Then it was time to move on to the back of the house in the downstairs spaces. We LOVE all of the windows in the back of the house because they allow us to look over the gorgeous view– farmland, rolling hills, mountains, and the big blue sky! The sun can get harsh, though, so we needed to have some way to block it a bit at times.

view out the back windows

After looking at a bazillionty (totally a word) pictures on Pinterest and in magazines, I decided that bamboo shades would be the perfect option for us. They would bring in some texture and interest to the space, block the light when we needed them to, and look beautiful open when we didn’t. Believe it or not, we had never had bamboo shades before, so I set out to do some research and pick the best ones for our space.

Deciding How to Mount Bamboo Shades

The first thing I needed to do was decide how I wanted to mount the shades. Should we go with an inside or outside mount? There were pros and cons to both. I read this awesome post by Young House Love where they recommended using an outside mount and mounting the shades above the actual window to make the windows look taller and more grand, which totally made sense.

But I also knew that we were planning on trimming out all of the windows in our house with some chunky, beautiful craftsman style trim, and the last thing I wanted to do was to cover that all up! So for us, I decided that the best option would be an inside mount so that the bamboo shades would compliment the pretty trim work without interfering with it.

our living room windows with new trim

Choosing a Color and Style of Bamboo Shades

Once I had decided how I would mount our shades, the next decision was to choose a color/style. Did you know that there are approximately 786 million different colors and styles of bamboo shades out there to choose from? Okay, so maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration, but there are a lot of options!

Again, I scoured the internet looking at examples of different types of bamboo shades, making note of what I liked and didn’t like. After I had gotten an idea of the type of look I was leaning toward, I decided to order some samples. This was an absolutely essential piece of the process.

Samples!

It is so hard to tell exact color and texture from a little square on a computer screen, so seeing a piece of the shade in person really helped me figure out which would be the perfect choice for us. I ordered our samples from SelectBlinds, who provides them for FREE (woot!), so that was a definite bonus!

Here are some of the options we considered:

Light Options

1. Designer Series Woven Wood Shades in Jute Natural | 2. Designer Series Woven Wood Shades in Bali Natural

 

Medium Options

1. Designer Series Woven Wood Shades in Bali Abaca | 2. Designer Series Woven Wood Shades in Antigua Seagrass | 3. Premier Bamboo Shades in Maize

4. Woven Wood Shades in Mindanao Sandal | 5. Tropical Isle Bamboo Shades in Bamboo Tortoise | 6. Shoreline Woven Wood Shades in Boldo

7. Tropical Isle Bamboo Shades in New Guinea Natural | 8. Tropical Isle Bamboo Shades in New Guinea Camel

 

Dark Options

1. Premier Bamboo Shades in Sapele | 2. Premier Bamboo Shades in Carapa

So many choices, right?! Since we have dark hardwood floors, I ended up eliminating the dark options because I knew that they could easily clash if they were similar but not exactly the same. I also tend toward a lighter aesthetic in our house and didn’t want the shades to make our rooms feel dark or heavy.

Since I use a lot of white in my decorating, I also eliminated the lighter options because once I had the samples and looked at them next to all of the white, they looked more yellow-ish, which wasn’t the look I was going for in our space.

So that left me with the “medium” options, and there were a lot of them! Ultimately I ended up going with the Designer Series Woven Wood Shades in Bali Abaca because I liked how they brought in both gray-ish and tan-ish tones, which helped me bring together some of the neutrals I was planning to use in our space.

Measuring and Installing the Bamboo Shades

We measured each of windows to get their exact measurements. Even in our house that is a new build, windows that are “the same” can vary by up to 1/2″, so we measured them individually in order to get the best fit possible. Having a perfect custom fit makes a huge difference as opposed to trying to rig an off-the-shelf shade from the home improvement store– it looks neat and clean and makes installation simple.

The blinds were designed to attach to the top of the window frame, so we measured to determine where to install the bracket so it would match up with the opening on the blinds.

Donnie then used his cordless drill to mount the brackets in place…

…then we slid the blinds onto the brackets, tightened two wing nuts to secure them, and they were good to go!

One of the things I love about SelectBlinds’ bamboo shades is that they are cordless, so I don’t need to worry about the boys getting caught in the cords and hurting themselves. It is so easy to pull them down with the little ring hidden on the back of the shade, and then pull down to release them back up again when we want to enjoy the view outside.

I absolutely love the look of the shades in our space, and I think they’re a perfect compliment to the trim work Donnie worked so hard to install! I may bring in curtains eventually, but right now I’m loving the windows as they are!

If you’re looking to install some beautiful bamboo shades or other window treatments in your own home, SelectBlinds is offering Just a Girl and Her Blog readers an additional 5% off any sale they’re currently having on their site when you use the code ABBY at checkout— hooray for savings! We have been absolutely thrilled with the look and quality of all of the window treatments we’ve ordered from SelectBlinds and could not recommend them more highly!

Have you chosen and installed bamboo shades in your house? I’d love to hear your thoughts about them in the comments! 

Have a wonderful week!

A huge thanks to SelectBlinds for providing the bamboo shades for this post. My favorable opinion of gorgeous, high quality window treatments is 100% my own. 🙂 This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.